Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

It’s only a few weeks until this year’s Code conference, so Monday Profile is going to start sharing some of the interviews with our presenters you’ll see in our Scroll: Code magazine.

We’re going to start with Tim Kadlec, web technology advocate at Akamai, and someone who knows more about the intersection of performance & responsive design than probably anyone around.

Tim’s Code session will focus on giving users the feeling that their web experiences are fast and friction-free. Let’s find out a bit about him.

Tim Kadlec: In Person

Q What made you decide you could do this for a living?

A In junior high, I saw a magazine at a local store that promised to teach you HTML for maybe $6, so I bought it and read it cover to cover. I honestly wasn’t that interested in web development. I liked to write, particularly about the history of basketball at that time, and wanted to be able to publish articles online. So I used the information in that magazine to build a very basic site full of all sorts of obnoxious animated GIFs, where I could write articles about basketball. Occasionally, I helped someone in town put together something simple as well.

In college, I found an ad for an agency that was looking for an entry level web developer. At that point, it had never occurred to me that I could do this as a full-time job, but I called up and scheduled an interview. I basically faked my way through the whole thing. When they offered me the job, I ran to the book store and bought a few books: Designing with Web Standards, Meyer on CSS, DOM Scripting and one or two more.

That weekend, all I did was read and code. By the time Monday came around I was at least OK enough to do the work (luckily, the agency wasn’t doing anything very advanced). Before long, I was hooked.

Q Have you ever coded live on stage, or in front of an audience? How did it go?

A No, never. I’ve seen a lot of people live code, but I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen do it well. I would definitely not be one of them. I’m guessing watching me make typo after typo for 45 minutes wouldn’t be particularly interesting to folks.

Q How do you further develop and extend your skills? Books, courses? Noodling by yourself?

A Videos, blog posts and books are certainly a part of it. I stubbornly hold onto my RSS feed and download a ton of talks to my computer to watch whenever I have a spare moment.  The reading and video watching doesn’t do much if you don’t practise, so firing open a browser and seeing what you can build and what you can break is important.

But if I had to say one thing more than any other that helps me, it’s that I am constantly bothering people smarter than myself with questions. Anytime I have an idea to bounce off someone, or run into something that doesn’t make sense, I fire off an email or send a message. We have a lot of smart people in our industry who are willing to share their knowledge — it’d be silly not to take advantage of it.

Q Is it better to learn HTML then CSS then JavaScript, or JavaScript then HTML then CSS, or all three at once, or something else?

A I learned it that way: HTML, CSS then JavaScript. That’s how I teach it to others as well. Markup is your base and everything else is layered on top of that, so to me it makes sense to teach the base first. As long as you start with the vanilla versions of each though, I think you’re probably OK. Jumping into a framework right away obscures a lot of core knowledge and at the end of the day it’s the core knowledge that will help you best adapt to new technologies.

Q What’s the best way to get more women coding?

A I’m not really qualified to provide the best advice here. If you really want to know how to make our industry a more welcome space for women, ask them. Listen to what they have to say and ask for clarification on things you don’t understand. There’s a lot we can do to make our community a friendly, safer space and I think it starts with being willing to listen.

Q Frameworks. What’s your take? Are they good, bad or does it depend on how you use them?

A It all depends. That’s the boring answer, but it’s true. I think it’s incredibly important to know the core language first—CSS before Sass, JavaScript before jQuery—but there’s nothing inherently bad about frameworks themselves. Abstractions can be useful, if applied with care.

The problem I see with them in our industry is the number of people who blindly reach for them, applying framework after framework without realizing what they’re giving up in the process. You don’t always need a framework, and if you understand the core, you’ll be able to tell the difference between when you don’t and when you do.

Q Tabs or spaces?

A Tabs, but not enough to have any sort of serious debate about them. More like the kind of debate you have with friends late one night when everyone involved has had a few drinks.

Q What’s on your horizon?

A The sun.

For the web, there’s plenty of stuff that has me excited: service workers (which I still don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of) and the physical web stuff come to mind right away. I’m interested to see how we handle the challenges of truly going global as we adjust our sites and applications for different markets, as well as the challenge of reducing our impact on the CPU.

Someone smarter than me pointed out that we’re increasingly becoming CPU bound in terms of performance, not network bound. It’s true, and it’s not necessarily something that has been true for very long. It’ll be interesting to see how we adjust for that new reality that we’ve created with loads of images and scripts.

Like to watch and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our once a week mailing list where we round up the week’s best reading and watching on all things Web. And you’ll get a complimentary digital copy of our Scroll magazine.